Quest text font

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William
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Post by William »

The Quest text font contains many glyphs in the Private Use Area.

Some of them are for glyphs for ligatures, some are for chess pieces and some are for expressing simple percussion music and so on.

Yet others are more abstract in design.

Some, such as those from U+E510 to U+E528 are just intended as designs.

Yet many of the others are intended to be used as authoring-time glyphs for commands to application packages. That is, the software of the application package would detect the character code and then do something other than display a glyph. For example, display all subsequent characters in red unless another colour code were detected, whereupon that would be the new colour.

Until recently I thought that I had either lost many of the meanings or that they were only available upon a presently inaccessible part of an old hard disc.

However, recently, I received an email that a particular forum about digital television at the http://www.cenelec.org webspace was going to close in a few days time from then, so I had a look through my old postings there and amongst them I found various files.

I am still going through them in detail, yet I have made them available on the web at the following place, partly to publish the information and partly so that they are on the web as well as on this PC.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/guide.htm

It is rather specialist research and some people do not agree with the concept of using Unicode codepoints for such things, yet I hope that some readers might find the documents interesting.

William Overington

9 November 2007
William
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Post by William »

I wanted to produce an A3 size poster featuring Quest text.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/heavy.pdf

I produced a font especially so as to produce an illustration.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/LOCOFONT.TTF

I produced the LOCOFONT.TTF font using FontCreator.

For artwork, I used locofont.gif which I produced by exporting from the Serif ImpactPlus program a view of a three-dimensional model of a locomotive. I started with a copy of the three-dimensional model of a locomotive which was used to produce the lowest down the page illustration on the following page.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/loco0100.htm

First of all I made the model all black, then I rotated it into position, then I exported the view as a gif file, bearing in mind all along the effect that I wanted to produce and that the gif file would be used as artwork for a glyph in a font using FontCreator's Import Image... facility.

William Overington

9 November 2007
William
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Post by William »

Quest text version 2.21 of 13 September 2007 has been available on the web for some time.

Upon checking this morning I found that I had not, in fact, posted that the upgrade is available.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF

William Overington

8 September 2008
Dick Pape
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...

Post by Dick Pape »

Removed DP
Last edited by Dick Pape on Mon Sep 15, 2008 12:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
William
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Post by William »

I have now updated the Quest text font to version 2.211 which differs from version 2.21 in that the flags for code pages Latin 2: Eastern Europe (1250) and Windows Baltic (1257) are set.

The flag for code page Latin 1 (1252) was set in version 2.21 and remains set in version 2.211.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/QUESTTXT.TTF

This change was because of a problem which is documented in the following thread.

viewtopic.php?t=2374

William Overington

9 September 2008
William
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Post by William »

Within the Unicode Private Use Area of the Quest text font are glyphs for expressing colours of text.

These usages of the codepoints are of my own allocation and have no official standing as regards Unicode.

In fairness to beginners I mention that including characters for such things as changes of colour in text is not the way that Unicode does things, it is my own idea.

Anyway, back in 2002 I defined some code point allocations and published them in the following document.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/courtcol.htm

That is one of a collection of documents.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/court000.htm

During the making of my Quest text font I devised glyphs for the codepoints, based on the Petra Sancta method used for expressing colours in monochrome printed books about heraldry. For example, using vertical lines for red and horizontal lines for blue. However, some, such as the glyphs for brown and orange are of my own devising. Some readers familiar with electronics hardware may recognize the resistor colour code in the order of the first ten colours in the list.

Today I have been trying to produce a pdf showing the glyphs in use.

In the event I am publishing two pdf documents.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Q ... glyphs.pdf

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/Q ... chrome.pdf

The reason for this is that the first one shows the colours yet I have not been able to copy and paste the codepoints from the pdf to WordPad. So I tried a monochrome version and found that I could copy and paste the codepoints from the pdf to WordPad with that version.

Yet the "in monochrome" version has the glyphs in monochrome yet the panel is in yellow, so the whole image is not monochrome. I left the panel in the pdf as I was wondering whether the panel was making the copy and paste go wrong and I wanted to test that possibility.

Whilst recognizing that the codepoint allocations are just one person's Unicode Private Use Area codepoint allocations, I would mention that the particular glyph designs are not part of the allocation. So other designs for glyphs could be used whilst still using those Unicode Private Use Area codepoint allocations for colours in the same manner.

The pdfs are both landscape format at size A3, so that they could potentially become exhibits in an art show.

William Overington

15 September 2008
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